Hey!

What with getting some encouragement, I'll do 5 more!

Given the situation of having boys, we sometimes do what they want to do. The movie "Transformers" is about giant alien robots, and in the movie, the storyline is that the government was hiding one of them under Hoover Dam. So, Hoover Dam was on our list of things to visit.

The state highway 93 goes over the top of the dam. There is a project to put in a new bridge nearby, the Mike O'Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. I was in awe of seeing the project being worked on. It appears to be an engineering and construction marvel, and it is a marvel that a crew is up there working on it!


Here is another view from the top of the dam. When I realize that some men call that a workplace, I say, "a desk job isn't so bad."


Inside the power plant, you can see the turbines that help to give Vegas and LA power. And note above them, the Flag of the United States, properly displayed!


Skipping ahead a few miles and states, here is Crater Lake, in Oregon.


We stayed nearby, at the BLM campgrounds at Diamond Lake. This was the view from where we parked the Barth.


There were no hookups there, but when it is this beautiful, who cares. There were dozens of RV sites in this BLM facility, but I think we got the best one. I don't know if it was the luck of the draw, or that my wife was making reservations as soon as was possible. The water in the lake was cool, but not worse than an ocean beach in Maine in the summer. It was the first time I'd been swimming outside and still able to see snow on the nearby peaks.

This is getting me eager to clean up the rig and get it read for the road!
Matt

Beautiful Matt, Keep the pics from the trip coming would also like to know the route you took and all the places you stayed, I'm planning on doing this trip with my crew the end of June, 2012. Any thing you learned would be very helpful.

Thanks, Dave R.

I am NOT going to drive across THAT bridge. Rather take my detour thru Laughlin (no trailers on US93 across Hoover Dam) even in the future. A few years back the whole construction collapsed in high winds and they had to restart. That gives me the eebeejeebies.
But thanks for the pictures and stories, we are enjoying them.

Dave R! I've been meaning to tell more of the story.... Here is a stream of consciousness of the trip west.

left Massachusetts, late in the day

did an overnight, at an I-84 rest area in NY. This was somewhere between Newburgh, and Port Jervis.

Continued on i-84 west to Scranton PA.
There, we got I-81 south to I-80W. I-81 was a nightmare of construction tie-ups.

In Harrisburg, we got on I-76W.
Short of Pittsburgh, we got on I-70W towards Columbus, OH.

It was getting close to midnight, and the highway rest areas were packed with trucks. I didn't like the idea of parking for the night on a ramp into, or out of a rest area.

We continued towards Columbus, and found an almost new huge rest area. Nice....

Along I-70, we passed Dayton, Indianapolis, St. Louis.

We lost an alternator belt (the serpentine) along here, and we stayed at an RV park in Missouri. I had a spare and replaced it the next morning.

We continued west on 70, and did an overnight at a highway rest area somewhere west of Topeka. Some of the Kansas rest areas have loop roads out back to make the night quieter. The Kansas rest areas also have the PA system tuned to the Weather Service to warn of tornadoes.

I started it up in the morning, and I recall that with the engine running, I was getting under 13V measured on the battery. Darn, I wished I had spent more time on the grounding.

It was hot, near 100F for temperature.
We continued I-70W to Colorado.
In Limon, CO, I took US-24 southwest to Colorado Springs, were we picked up I-25 South.

We spent the night in a beautiful city owned RV park in Pueblo, CO.

In Wahlsenburg, we took US-160 West, through a mountain pass, towards Durango. This pass was intense, with tunnels, and heavy rains and hail.
This took us to Durango.

Wow! In looking up information about this, I see that we went through Wolf Creek Pass on 160, at 10,850 feet. That was higher than Vail Pass.
Grades on the road were at 6.5% according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_mountain_passes

We stayed in Durango for a few days, at an RV resort. I thought I had the oldest rig there, there were quite a few bus chassis rigs. The manager was getting complaints about a 1980s International school bus, painted in black primer, with a wooden cupola, Grateful Dead stickers, and lots of little kids running around.

We took a ride on the Durango-Silverton railroad. I'll post some pictures of that.

Continuing west on US 160, we went to Mesa Verde, near Cortez, CO. The Walmart had some RVs parking in it, and it also looked like some folks in pickup trucks had been in the parking lot for more than a few days. We stayed at a nearby RV park for 1 night I think.

US 160 West will go near "4 Corners", where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet up. It was over 100F. We stopped off for a break there. From there, we were briefly in Arizona, and then took US 64 East to Shiprock, NM. Here, we headed south on US 491, to Gallup NM. Pulling in to Gallup, at night, it was neat to see the neon of the "historic route 66".

We stayed at a nice RV park in Gallup, with a pool and laundry facilities for a night. From here, we headed west on I-40. We got off I-40 on every town where there were signs for "historic route 66", such as Winslow. Some of the towns seemed to be worn out with nothing going for them. Even Winslow seemed like kind of a desperate place. Maybe the heat was giving me this view.

We wanted to spent a night in Flagstaff, then headed south in I-17 to head to Sedona. But it was July 4th weekened at this point, and lots of people apparently come to Flagstaff for the fireworks adn events. We didn't find a place to stay. So we headed to Sedona.

We took Alt-89 South to Sedona. There are some intense passes and drop offs on this road. This was white knuckle time. The sun was still up. There are some hairpin turns, and having a rig bigger than the 27' I had would be really scary.

An old pal of mine lives more south in Prescott, and he drove up. It was good to see him. After a day in Sedona, I didn't want to head back through the hairpins, so we went on AZ 179 south, to get on I-17. We took this N to Flagstaff, and got US 180 to bring us to AZ 64. We took that north to the south Rim of the Grand Canyon.

We stayed in the National Park a couple of days. The intent now was to drive on AZ 64, to US 89 North, to cross the Colorado River at Marble Canyon. It was getting up over 110F. Maybe 120F. And talk about what appears to be a desolate wasteland... Every now and then, you'd see a trailer off in the distance someone was living in, or had lived in.

And in this environment, my voltage gauge starts registering a falling voltage. Ugh. I didn't want to shut the engine off, figuring if I did, we'd be in a world of hurt. I figured that maybe the people living in the trailers, if there were people there, would help us with some water, but what about parts? We kept going, along Alt 89, to Jacob Lake, AZ. We turned off all 12V items running off the engine battery.

We stopped there, at a National Park information center, and we told the rangers of our plan to go to the North Rim. They advised that there was nothing in terms of vehicular services in that direction. I ran my generator for a while to charge the battery.

We headed north on Alt-89 and got to Kanab Utah. The refrigerator had died at this point. We spent the night in Kanab, in a nice RV park with a pool, and were next to some Swiss RVers. They had new rental RVs, and we told them of the heat problems my rig was having. They had flown in to LA, and they had been told by their rental company they were prohibeted from going to Death Valley. We scratched Death Valley off our plans.

I used the hookups at the place to get my batteries charged overnight. I poked around the RV fridge, to see if a wire was bad, or if a fuse had blown. All looked well. The owner told us we could find an RV service guy in Hurricane, Utah. We drove through Zion NP to get there. I found Main Street RV Repair, in Hurricane. The owner says that they don't use "isolators" in the desert because the heat kills them. He identified a fusible link in the fridge, which is intended to shut of the power in the event of a fire. Yes, it was hot in the desert.
I took the isolator out of the circuit, and bought a "continuous duty" solenoid at the NAPA store, like the repair guy told me to do. (I still haven't installed it yet)

We made it back to Zion NP and stayed in the Park a few days. This was a great park, and I'd be eager to go here again.

We headed towards Vegas, to go to the Hoover Dam. well, I think I-15 was torn up or something, so we got on NV 169 South, towards the water backed up behind the dam.

It was not cooler at all, in fact, it goes through "Valley of Fire" state park. Oh, and after being on this road for 15 miles, we got to the sign, "Rebuilding America", and the road was torn up. We were doing about 10 mph. [Did I mention that state visitor centers don't have info about what roads are torn up????] We connected to 167, and 166, to get to Boulder City and the dam. We went over the dam on US93 to park at the oversize vehicles lot.

To go over the dam, we had to stop for a security inspection.

Afterwards, we headed back to I-15, to take that to LA. Along the way, the RV parks were filled, and we might have found something along the way, between Baker and Yermo. I remember 11PM, and 100F.

The next day, we made it to Anaheim. We met my brother and went to the Angels/Yankees game, the last game before the all-star break.

Happy Motoring!
Matt

Crossed the Hoover Dam new bridge. Short little thing and you cannot see over the sidewalls, even in a semi. Tons of people on the pedestrian walk looking down though.